Blog

If I had known before, what kind of stir my last innocent rant about a niche-product like the Cintiq 27QHD would provoke, I'd probably never bothered writing a single line...

To sum it up, I received dozens of mails ranging from 'you idiot!!1' to 'i kill ypur family whem not deleting the posts'. I received a lot of nice e-mails too, but they don't support the following narrative for now, so I'm going to ignore them for the time being ;)

People on the Wacom forum linked to me, proposing I'm 'having an agenda'. At least they did not threaten to kill me. But, they are also wrong. I do not have an agenda. All I wanted, was to document the crappy software that comes from Wacom.

As I said before, the hardware is exceptionally well made. And even the thoughts that go in their software regularly earn 9/10 points in my opinion. So, it is not the planing and intention that goes wrong, it is "just" horrible execution.

I contacted Wacom Support and sent them my earlier post. And as I predicted, they could not help me. All I got was a link to an Apple Support document to reset my NVRAM and the really helpful hint to "try different cables". And that is EXACTLY what I was talking about. There is nobody who really cares. It doesn't matter if I post a really hurtful article on my blog and get hundreds of visits each day from people searching for "Cintiq 27 review". They just don't care.

I found a workaround for the problem of my Macs not booting up when the display was connected. I switched the Mini-Displayport-to-display-port adapter that was provided by Wacom to one of my own. This worked. At least, the computer is now booting up. But all the other problems, as small as they may seem, still are there. And they are freaking huge when you try to work with this tablet. The on-screen help, the one listing the actual function of your buttons, which is showing on the wrong display is a deal-breaker. It is just not possible to use the tablet without getting insane.

Another thing is, one of the posters on the Wacom Forum asked: "is it the hardware or just the software?". That is really mind-blowing in my opinion. Is it ok if the product doesn't work and it is "just software?" I don't think so. This is a fucking expensive, highly specialized piece of hardware. Is it really too much to ask, that it works from day one? And we are not talking about "fringe cases". The bugs I mentioned are reproducible on all of my systems.

This lack of detail shows everywhere. For example, Wacom asked me to register my product for "more support". That is ok, I guess. So I tried. But I couldn't. Here is the form: http://www.wacom.eu/index4.asp?pid=25And if you look closely, the Cintiq 27QHD isn't in the list. This is just a little thing, of course. But it is the sum of all these "minor problems" that makes the difference between giving your customer the feeling that you care or that you don't give a flying fuck.

Take my review "with a grain of salt", as one forum member suggested. Make up your own mind, I'm just one guy who is using Wacom products for more than 20 years now and who feels deeply sorry seeing it all go down the drains. And don't get me wrong, I'm keeping my Cintiq. It is the best tablet I can get. But it is the only one on the market. And that may very well be, the source of my problems.

Today I received the new Cintiq 27QHD. Boy, I really looked forward to this. I unpacked it and it looks just gorgeous. The edge to edge screen, the new remote, the slim design. Just look for yourself:

And then I made a big mistake and actually tried to use it...

Let's start at the beginning.

Shortly after installing the (latest, of course) drivers, the Mac comes up with this nifty little box:

I can deactivate this interface in network preferences, sure. Doesn't seem to have any side effects, the tablet works just fine (I mean, besides all the shit that's not working). But... WHY?

Now on to the new remote. Heavy, aluminum-body, magnetic. Nicely built. Until, you guessed it, I tried to use it.

When using the Express key remote, ALL on-screen shit is displayed on the wrong display. Always on the internal display of my iMac. That is really helpful. Constantly switching between two displays is not annoying at all. Nope. Not at all. And the kicker: This isn't the first time. When Yosemite came out, I had the exact same problem with the 24HD. And Wacom just needed a couple of months to fix this. To be honest, most of the time it took was denial of the problem. It always was the customer. Try to reinstall... try to do this and that. No boys, maybe you should just get your shit together and fix your software.

Ok, calming down and off to something positive. The screen:

One thing that is clearly visible the first time you look at the new display: it is bright. Really bright. Staring directly into the sun bright. Which is nice. But, a little too bright for my eyes and so I wanted to adjust it. Doesn't work. There is a "Display Settings" menu in the all-great-and-mighty POS the Wacom Software is: "Open Display Settings". Yeah... no. Doesn't work at all. What I get is:

So... Does my tablet need it? I guess so, as there is no other freakin' way of adjusting anything at all. Does it work? No. It does not.

Ok. Using the tablet as a tablet, doesn't really work at this time. I get it. It's hard to come up with a working product. At least I can use the display as a lamp for my office. I mean, it is bright. Except... I can't even do that without problems.

When connected, my Mac doesn't boot up anymore. It hangs at boot. Indefinitely. What helps is unplugging (or turning off) the Cintiq. After that, booting continues. Ja, that is what I want to do, unplug my fucking 3000$ display every time I restart my computer.

This is my fourth or fifth Wacom Cintiq. They are great. Fabulously built and after about a year on the market, you can actually use them (to a point and until a major OS X update comes along). And I am sick of it. I really hope someone else will come out of the shadows and builds a competing product. WACOM just lost it. They've gone lazy with nearly no competition in the market. The hardware may be really good, but the software is so unbelievably bad, it's borderline insane.

In conclusion, I cannot recommend this thing to anyone. Absolutely nobody. Unless you like spending a couple thousands bucks to get kicked in your nuts and laughed at. Then, this may be the perfect product for you.

Just a quick post with some demo-files for the new PRIME noise reduction of DxO 9. Really like it so far, and this feature truly IS impressing. But, it is slow. Really slow. Even on a maxed out iMac. But then again, there you have the first use-case for the new Mac Pro in December :)

You'll find 6 files in the ZIP below. Two different pictures in three variants (no noise reduction, high noise reduction and the new PRIME), both taken with high ISO. One with the D800, one with the Sony RX1.

Today I received an e-mail that showed, how to handle communications with your customer, if things have gone south.

It's so simple, that I cannot understand how anybody could do it differently. But people do. Especially the Germans. Let me paint you a picture of what happens when a german company (at least most of them) fucks things up.

Best case:

You'll get a letter-of-apology. Kind of… They will never take responsibility. They will point out some "unusual circumstances", that "weren't handled correctly by the system in place" and assure you that they will "take appropriate measures to better handle this kind of exception in the future". Then they will hit you with some legal mumbo jumbo, that essentially just tells you to be lucky, if you get what you ordered in less than 4 weeks. They will cite some court-rulings and point to their general-terms-and-conditions. And at last, you will read something like:

"Despite all this (read: "Although you are an idiot and we can totally get away with fucking you hard"), and with no legal obligation, we value you as a customer and are happy to offer you a partial refund."

Worst case:

They don't do shit and just wait for you to take actions. Then, they don't do shit and wait for your lawyer to write them. Then they write you back and after a short waiting period of approximately 3 to 5 years, you may get a court to decide on your case and you both split the cost 50/50.

Ok, now let's take a look at what the guys from www.mybanana.com did, when they made a mistake with my order.

That's the e-mail I received:

Dear Mirko,

Thank you so much for your order from MyBanana!

I'm afraid we have some bad news for you.. There was a miscalculation from our part and unfortunately we have run out of stock on the case you have ordered for your 15" Retina Macbook Pro. You purchased the last one on Friday, but we had miscounted 1 more in stock. We understand this is unacceptable and we would like to apologize for this inconvenience that this has caused to you.

2. Wait for one to be made for you, which I am afraid will take approximately 1 week to arrive to you

3. Cancel your order and receive a full refund immediately, even though we would hate ourselves for it :(

Please let us know how you'd like to proceed as soon as possible so that we can process the shipment of your case tomorrow!

My best regards and apologies for informing you so late,

Mike & MyBanana Team

So, what happened here?

They took responsibility.Personal responsibility. Not some "unusual circumstances", just a plain: "we counted wrong". Also not: "a third party, that was subcontracted with counting from 1 to 5 made an error…".

They were honest. Again: "We miscounted". That is an error that can happen. It shouldn't, but it can.

They offered a solution.Three solutions to be correct. Each of them totally acceptable: Getting a different color, with a discount. Waiting a few more days for the original order to be delivered and last but not least: canceling my order.

Being personal and funny.The whole mail is really personal. Not only did they address me directly, there is an actual person (Mike) who wrote this mail. And they were fun too ("even though we would hate ourselves for it :(" )

What I did was to go with the light-grey alternative. A few minutes after I answered this mail, I got a reply. That also was one of the nicest mails I have received this month. And an hour or so later, I got my shipping notice.

Now, look what being honest did for Mike and his team. Not only do they now have a new and satisfied customer, no, they turned a shitty-situation for a first contact into the exact opposite. And I even took 10 minutes of my time to blog about it and spread the word.

Until recently, I would have answered this question with a 'Yes, of course". But now... not so much.

The thing is, speed does change a lot of things. Let me give you some examples:

Faster search and thereby access to my mails, totally changed the way I deal with them. In the past, they got filed away neat and tidy in folders. Now, I don't care. If I ever need access again, I just search for them and boom, there they are. Same goes for files and bookmarks and my notes. I trust the servers they lie on, to find what I'm looking for.

Higher transfer-speeds transformed the way I work with data. Keeping some "installation-files" in case I ever need them again? Don't do that anymore. Copying files between computers, especially with my notebook? Not doing this anymore. Anything I need is accessible via Dropbox or my own central server. Even really big files aren't a problem. A single file that can't be streamed is almost never bigger than a couple of dozens of megabyte and if, in rare cases, I need something that is maybe a gigabyte or two, it means waiting minutes, not hours.

Now, back to why I'm writing this post. As you know, I'm developing "Krikkit for iOS". A friend of mine is doing something similar, but with a different approach: OPD. The main difference is: While I'm trying to do most things locally on the device, OPD is a pure web app, that has to do all the heavy lifting on a server. And the second big difference: The OPD-guys host all the data by themselves (although it's technically AWS, but for the sake of this argument...), while I'm trying to rely on free, publicly accessible services like OPS, Depatisnet, Google (patents) and a couple of other services.

So, I had to ask myself:

Which approach is better?

The first question that comes to my mind is: "What can they do, that I cannot?"

There are two main things:

Being fasterThey can (in theory) be at lot faster than my app. Not interface-wise, but with an initial answer to the users question.

Do more with the dataHaving all the (raw) data at your disposal, gives you a lot of freedom of what you can do.

Now, let's have a closer look at these two advantages (that come at a price, but more on that later).

Being faster

The premise of Krikkit for iOS is finding relevant patent-information. If you do a full-text-search, having (near) instant results is crucial, as searching this way is a very recursive process. You enter something, get a result, quickly scan over the result, change the search, do it again.

The thing is: People don't search that way when it comes to patent-information. And that isn't just a hunch, there is hard evidence to prove it.

Krikkit for iOS has two distinct search modes: One freestyle search with a single input box, and a more "detailed" search where you can select search-fields, enter date ranges, use proximity operators and use AND/OR to connect search terms.

Krikkit currently is in a closed beta with about 300 active testers. 100 are employees of our customers, 100 were selected via XING as being "interested in IP" and 100 were found via postings in some iOS developer forums. In case anybody wonders about the >100 testers: The answer is, Enterprise signed IPAs.

This beta, and the monitoring that comes with it, gave me some pretty interesting insight. All the data is from the last 3 weeks.

Total number of searches: 14.001Number of successful (non null) searches: 12.818Searches via detailed-search: 9.938Average result set: 94Average time to first result: 3.7s

Average time spent on browsing search-results: 2.2 minAverage number of detail-views per search result: 10Average number of marked patents per search-results: 5

Let's have a closer look at these numbers.

More than 75% of all searches were conducted with the "old-school" search form, although it is not the standard option. Why is that? My first idea was: The results from the simple search are so bad, that people use the alternative and stick with it, because it is slightly better. That wouldn't prove anything. So I had to dig a little deeper and started browsing the sessions logs, which essentially show me every little thing, someone does in the app. And that's where things began to get interesting...

As it turns out, people started using the simple search and got a result. But then, they switched to the detailed search and refined their search. They filtered by assignee, country of origin and dates. And after that, most of them, never touched the simple search again. They merely used it as a starting point to get a better understanding of how and for what to search.

The average time spent on looking through the results, is more than 2 minutes. That's a long time, but is in good correlation to the 10 opened detail-views (which show you the patent in detail). The quality of the results also seems to be quite good, as the ratio of 2/1 for documents marked as relevant, shows.

So, what?

People give drafting their searches a lot of thought, so the number of documents to look through, goes down. And if you spend 20 or 30 seconds of your time, putting together a good query, you don't mind if the answer takes 3 or 4 seconds, especially if the result is good. Heck, even if it is 10 seconds in some rare cases, that still wouldn't be a deal-breaker. I guess, you can put it this way:

The acceptable timespan of waiting for an answer, directly correlates to the time used for formulating the question and the subsequent quality of the answer.

In conclusion, there is absolutely no need for an instant answer. Sure, it'd be nice to have. But the price I would have to pay, is too high. Maintaining my own set of data is just too expensive. Whether it's the cost for AWS, the cost for the data itself or just the manpower to keep all this running.

Now, does speed change everything? Yes and no. It does change a lot of things, but sometimes it's just not necessary, and essentially, too expensive. I guess what I learned (again) is, to look behind the initial "that's easy, I know the answer".

As this post already got 2 cups of coffee longer, than I initially planed, I'll have to save commenting on "Do more with the data" for a later date.

About a year ago, we started work on porting our existing libraries of about 15+ years of code for handling patent-data, to objective-c. The goal was (and still is) to bring together the various tools and utilities to a cocoa-based one-stop-shop for handling all our needs. Whether it's research, retrieving and aggregating data or updating a client's database. About 70% of the functionality is handled by our backend-webservices, so this tool, for the bigger part, is essentially a fancy frontend.

After the first batch of libraries was finished, I decided to start another project. We'll come back to this in just a few seconds.

Krikkit is our flagship. It is a web-application for dealing with (curated) patent-data. It's using all the modern shebang a browser offers and is a really great product. It's fast and feels like a proper desktop-application. But it's optimized to be used on a PC. You can use it on a tablet or a phone, everything works and it even looks quite nice, but it feels wrong.

So, work began on Krikkit for iOS. It's not so much a companion-app, but a new product. The idea was to leverage all the tools and code I had on my hands and my own experience of nearly 20 years, and cram it in an app that does one thing: Finding and retrieving patent-information. To be fair, until recently, I never planned on releasing it. It was more of a way to get back into programming (which I hadn't done in quite a good time). But after using my own app on a day-to-day basis, I realized something: The app feels totally different than all the tools I knew. Be it Depatisnet, or Espacenet or even our own, big, Krikkit.

And that's where I decided to let go of our mobile web-applications. Let me explain:

Web-apps are great. They make it easy for people to do something. No installation, no messing around and, in theory, they should run everywhere. If done right, there really isn't much of a difference to a "real application". All of this is true, but when you leave the comfort of a big-screen, a mouse/touchpad, a nice chair und A/C, this all changes. No matter how hard you try, no matter what techniques you are using, as soon as you are on a mobile device and run a web-application, it always feels wrong. It is slow, it is unresponsive, it is getting on your nerves. That's not because the web-app on your phone or tablet runs slower than on a desktop, it is because people got used to getting instant feedback. When they touch something, they need a reaction right away. They know how to swipe and how to pinch and zoom. If they touch the screen and start swiping and there is even the slightest of lag, the application becomes unsexy.

There are dozens of other good reasons to go native. And with native I mean native. Not some cross-platform-shit. And there is exactly one reason, not to go native: Laziness.

From time to time, people come to me and ask for advice. Just like today, when a friend asked me about „some good display protector“ for his iPhone.

I couldn’t help. Mainly for two reasons:

I don’t use display protectors

Using them is utterly stupid.

I never understood, why anybody would want to put some silly plastic foil on his beautiful gadget. It’s not like they need any kind of protection. Just take a look at this video:

So there is this high-tech glass, made to endure even the hardest of tests. And that’s not enough? Maybe they did not know how durable modern glass is. That’s ok. After seeing the video, they know and can stop with their endeavour.

But some don’t. Why? What are they thinking?

"Ah, screw Corning! What do they know! Wrapping my phone in a used-condom is the way to go! That'll show them!"

I don’t know. Maybe that’s exactly what they are thinking. But let’s pretend for a minute, that these „protectors“ really do protect the display. At least a little bit. I’m not saying, modern gadgets don’t get scratches. They do. Over time, you will most definitely see some minor ones. They don’t show while using the phone, but when you tilt it a bit and the light shines on it in exactly the right angle, you can spot them.

These scratches may have been prevented with some kind of sticker on the display. Maybe.

But, for what price?

What happens with these „scratchstoppers“ is, they get scratched right away. Just minutes after putting them on, they are scratched. And of course they are, it’s just a shitty plastic thingy you put on your display! But, no worry, the display beneath is fine.

So… Now you can use your phone with a display that looks like shit more and more from day to day, knowing it really is ok, deep down.

And that is the defintion of insanely stupid. But sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words: